Feb
I saw a 30second commercial for the National Guard on Hulu.com recently that’s like Starship Troopers without the bugs. Found it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5pQW-k43is
It’s revolting to watch them start out with benignly helping folks and quickly lead into to tanks and killing, given the recent history of military propaganda and the climate of fear fomented by politicians in league with the corporate media post 9/11. I remember the lip service given to freedom and our fine ideals and the insistence by those who voted for more warfare that we were going there to help and do good. I remember the justification of liberating the people, most especially the women who, in reality, had a greater likelihood of being starved, killed, raped, or now may have children with birth defects due to the “Happy Liberation” gift we left of Radioactive Uranium Dust, making Saddam Hussein’s exploits look small by comparison.
Shiny buttons and fancy swords (as shown in the recruiting video) can’t hide the shame brought on the uniform by engaging in illegal preemptive warfare on premise of lies wrought through means of torture to jumpstart the Bush Dynasty Wars, Part Deux. Military service is no longer an honorable profession so long as war follows a corporate profit motive. Some of the idiots that signed up for a paycheck, while claiming to be patriots, were too dense to catch on even when the neocons spelled it out for them in an acronym: Operation Iraqi Liberation= OIL. For years they still denied the stupidity. Years. Even after watching the military stand over the oil field while Iraqs museums were ransacked and the women were raped…er, “liberated”. Even after the Abu-Ghraib documented evils, even after finding out how much Halliburton profited.http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=544476389136766337#
But hardly anyone denies the stupidity of Iraq now. Yet people still sign up to go over there and kill people in some other area nearby and continue to fuel the military industrial complex chasing a boogieman Al Queda that didn’t even exist before we called it that? We can’t kill the idea that is morally reprehensible to some Muslims, we’re only giving it fuel by attacking them and occupying their lands. http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
If we’re going to blow money over there instead of at home, common sense says forgo weapons, invest, and give the Iraqis jobs that don’t involve killing Americans. But that would be *common* sense, which serves the commoner. The military is not serving the common person by going over there, they’re serving (albeit indirectly) profiteering corporations that are milking the taxpayers…and they’re consigning us, our children, and grandchildren in a national debt to foreign interests.
Corporations are amoral. By and large, they exist, bottom-line, for profit. That’s why we must resist their influence in politics and pop culture and public opinion if we wish to preserve some semblance of morality. Even now, with Bush & Co. out of the picture, the corporations continue to gain ground. The problem is much bigger than punishing a guilty figurehead such as Bush or Cheney (though that would be a welcome start). The corruption is firmly entrenched in America but who can and will root it out? What’s it going to take when corporations own nearly everything, have the most money and power, and will get each other’s back but not the average American’s? Who’s looking out for the poor chump that’s lured to his/her death by this video?
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